Many businesses and organizations employ one or more business applications, and in some cases, suites of business applications, to provide visibility and control over various aspects of the business. Such “business applications” (or, as they are sometimes called, “enterprise applications”) can include, without limitation, portfolio project management (“PPM”) applications, customer relations management (“CRM”) applications, human capital management (“HCM”) applications, and other applications dealing with various finance, accounting, manufacturing, and/or distribution functions, which can be recognized as an embodiment of an enterprise resource planning (“ERP”) system. Exemplary enterprise application suites include, without limitation, Oracle Fusion, Oracle eBusiness Suite and JD Edwards Enterprise One, all of which are available from Oracle Corporation of Redwood Shores, Calif.
For many of these enterprise/business applications, it would be very useful to be able to provide an effective mechanism to allow users of the system to interact and collaborate with each other. For example, many business applications offer social tools like Yammer (Microsoft Enterprise Project Management) and Chatter (Salesforce) and other social tools like Oracle Social Network. These social tools help track inputs, comments and help members of the enterprise communicate meaningfully on various project-related tasks.
Specifically in the context of project management systems such as the Oracle PPM system, it might be very helpful to understand the pulse and direction of past, current and future projects through the nature of social interaction regarding these projects on social networking sites. This may provide project managers visibility into a project's progress, excitement for the project, difficulties in the project, and other such metrics prior to the availability of traditional quantifiable metrics for the project (e.g., revenue, completion date, etc.). In this type of integrated system, social network data can be mined specifically for the use of project management system to gain valuable insights on ongoing projects of an enterprise.